Bias creeps into reference checks, so is it time to ditch them?

2018/01/08 Leave a comment

Hadn’t thought of this aspect of bias in reference checks. When hiring in government, I was always conscious of the selection bias in the references submitted – people generally do not submit negative references! When asked if I was willing to be a reference, I would flag if I had any issues that I would have to include in the reference:

As much as we’d like to think we’ve refined the hiring process over the years to carefully select the best candidate for the job, bias still creeps in.

Candidates who come from privileged backgrounds are more able to source impressive, well-connected referrers and this perpetuates the cycle of privilege. While the referrer’s reputation and personal clout make up one aspect of the recommendation, what they actually say – the content – completes the picture.

Research shows gender bias even invades in the content of recommendations. In this study female applicants for post-doctoral research positions in the field of geoscience were only half as likely as their male counterparts to receive excellent (as opposed to just good) endorsements from their referees. Since it’s unlikely that of the 1,200 recommendation letters analysed, female candidates were less excellent than the male candidates, it means something else is going on.

A result like this may be explained by the gender role conforming adjectives that are used to describe female versus male applicants. Women are more likely to be observed and described as “nurturing” and “helpful”, whereas men are attributed with stronger, more competence-based words like “confident” and “ambitious”. This can, in turn, lead to stronger recommendations for male candidates.

Worryingly, in another study similar patterns emerged in the way black versus white, and female versus male, medical students were described in performance evaluations. These were used as input to select residents.

In both cases the members of minority groups were described using less impressive words (like “competent” versus “exceptional”), a pattern that was observed even after controlling for licensing examination scores, an objective measure of competence.

Recommendations aren’t good predictors of performance

Let’s put the concerns about bias aside for a moment while we examine an even bigger question: are recommendations actually helpful, valid indicators of future job performance or are they based on outdated traditions that we keep enforcing?

Even back in the 90s, researchers were trying to alert hiring managers to the ineffectiveness of this as a tool, noting some major problems.

The first problem is leniency, referees are allowed to be chosen by the candidate and tend to be overly positive. The second is too little knowledge of the applicant, as referees are unlikely to see all aspects of a prospective employees’ work and personal character.

Reliability is another problem. It turns out there is higher agreement between two letters written by the same referee for different candidates, than there is for two letters (written by two different referees) for the same candidate!

There is evidence that people behave in different ways when they are in different situations at work, which would reasonably lead to different recommendations from various referees. However, the fact that there is more consistency between what referees say about different candidates than between what different referees say about the same candidate remains a problem.

The alternatives to the referee

There are a few initiatives that are currently being used as alternatives to standard recruitment processes. One example is gamification – where candidates play spatial awareness or other job-relevant games to demonstrate their competence. For example, Deloitte has teamed up with software developer, Arctic Shores, for a fresh take on recruitment in an attempt to move away from the more traditional methods of recruitment.

However, gamification is not without its flaws – these methods would certainly favour individuals who are more experienced with certain kinds of video games, and gamers are more likely to be male. So it’s a bit of a catch-22 for recruiters who are introducing bias through a process designed to try to eliminate bias.

If companies are serious about overcoming potential bias in recruitment and selection processes, they should consider addressing gender, racial, economic and other forms of inequality. One way to do this is through broadening the recruitment pool by making sure the language they use in position descriptions and jobs ads is more inclusive. Employers can indicate flexible work options are available and make the decision to choose the minority candidates when they are equally qualified as other candidates.

Another option is to increase the diversity of the selection committee to add some new perspectives to previously homogeneous committees. Diverse selectors are more likely to speak up about and consider the importance of hiring more diverse candidates.

Job seekers could even try running a letter of reference through software, such as Textio, that reports gender bias in pieces of text and provides gender-neutral alternatives. But just as crucial is the need for human resources departments to start looking for more accurate mechanisms to evaluate candidates’ competencies.

via Bias creeps into reference checks, so is it time to ditch them?

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ICYMI: How the federal government is slowly becoming as diverse as Canada

2018/01/08 Leave a comment

Good overview article by Aaron Wherry of CBC on diversity in government, both public service and political appointments. Some of my analysis quoted and used:

Campaigning in 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised to “build a government as diverse as Canada.”

That job might’ve seemed nearly done on Day One. Of the 31 ministers sworn in on Nov. 4, 2015, 15 were, famously, women. Five ministers were visible minorities and two others were Indigenous.

A cabinet ratio of 48.3 per cent women, 16.1 per cent visible minorities and 6.5 per cent Indigenous comes close to matching a Canadian population that was 50.9 per cent women, 22.3 per cent visible minorities and 4.9 per cent Indigenous.

But a prime minister and his government are responsible for far more than a few dozen cabinet positions. The cabinet oversees more than 1,500 appointments, including chairs and members of boards, tribunals and Crown corporations, deputy ministers, heads of foreign missions, judges and senators.

On that much larger scale, progress has been made, but the ideal of a government that looks like Canada is still a ways off.

A new appointment process

When the government was sworn in, just 34 per cent of federal appointees were women, 4.5 per cent were visible minorities and 3.9 per cent were Indigenous.

Two years later, according to data from the Privy Council Office, 42.8 per cent of appointees are women, 5.6 per cent are visible minorities and 5.8 per cent are Indigenous.

In February 2016, the Liberal government announced a new appointment process for boards, agencies, tribunals, officers of Parliament and Crown corporations. It specified diversity as a goal and opened applications to the public.

According to the Privy Council Office, 429 appointments were made via that process through Dec. 5, 2017. Of those, 56.6 per cent were women, 11.2 per cent were visible minorities and 9.6 per cent were Indigenous.

A total of 579 appointments — including deputy ministers, heads of mission and appointments for which requirements are specified in law — were made through existing processes. Of those, 43.7 per cent were women, 3.8 per cent were visible minorities and 5.2 per cent were Indigenous.

“Mr. Trudeau has been more intentional on these issues than his predecessors and has made great progress in opening up the process. He has also clearly made great strides on gender,” says Wendy Cukier, director of Ryerson University’s Diversity Institute.

But, says Cukier, the government’s efforts toward transparency and equal opportunity need to be accompanied by “proactive outreach and recruitment as well as retention strategies” in order to “address some of the barriers historically disadvantaged groups have faced.”

Eleanore Catenaro, press secretary for the prime minister, says, “Our aim is to identify high-quality candidates who will help to achieve gender parity and truly reflect Canada’s diversity.”

She says, “We know there is more work to do to achieve these goals, and we continue to do outreach to potential qualified and diverse candidates to encourage them to apply.”

Rigorous reporting of demographic data across federal appointments could presumably drive change — or at least give the  government something to answer for — but most of these numbers have not been made public.

“It is crucial that the government tracks, measures and reports on diversity in all areas,” says Sen. Ratna Omidvar, the founding director of Ryerson’s Global Diversity Exchange. “By doing so, we are able to see where we are making progress and where we need to improve.”

Beneath those top-line numbers, there are a few other points of reference.

According to Global Affairs Canada, the government made 87 heads-of-mission appointments — ambassadors, consul generals and official representatives — in 2016 and 2017. Forty-eight per cent were women and 13.8 per cent were visible minorities. There were no Indigenous appointees.

Senate and court appointments

Andrew Griffith, a former official at the department of citizenship and immigration who has been tracking diversity in federal appointments, has counted 18 women, six visible minorities and three Indigenous Canadians among Trudeau’s 31 Senate appointments.

As a result of an initiative to track judicial appointees, the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs has published a tally of court appointments from Oct. 21, 2016 through Oct. 27, 2017. Between those dates, 74 judicial appointments were made, of whom 50 per cent were women, 12.1 per cent were visible minorities and four per cent were Indigenous.

But that data also suggested the pool of candidates was limited: of the 997 applications received, just 97 applicants identified as a visible minority and 36 were Indigenous.​

At some point, it might be charged that diversity is being inappropriately prioritized ahead of merit or competency — as Kevin O’Leary once alleged of Trudeau’s cabinet. But such suggestions assume that achieving diversity must come at the expense of merit.

Ideally, diversity would also amount to more than a numerical value.

3 benefits of diversity

Griffith, for instance, suggests three potential benefits of diversity in appointments: that it allows Canadians to see themselves represented in government institutions, that it brings a range of experience and perspectives to government policies and operations and that it reduces the risk of inappropriate policies (for example, an RCMP interview guide that asked asylum-seekers about their religious practices).

“It has been proven over and over that more diversity in the workplace leads to better outcomes,” says Omidvar, who is also pushing to tighten the standards included in a proposed government bill that would require corporate boards to report on diversity.

But the most profound impact could conceivably relate to Griffith’s first potential benefit. A nation that values diversity and pluralism might want its institutions to reflect those principles — and institutions that reflect those principles might advance the building of a multicultural society.

“It normalizes diversity,” Omidvar said of public appointments. “At this point, diversity is still sort of not the norm, which is why we focus on it.”

via How the federal government is slowly becoming as diverse as Canada – Politics – CBC News

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«On ne doit jamais tenir pour acquise notre cohésion sociale», dit Joly

2017/12/22 Leave a comment

True.

And good to see that the Liberal government has maintained and strengthened the program introduced by the Conservatives to provide funding for security equipment for faith centres:

Les appels à manifester lancés la semaine dernière par des groupes d’extrême droite avant qu’ils ne se ravisent sont un rappel qu’on «ne doit jamais tenir pour acquise notre cohésion sociale».

C’est ce qu’a déclaré la ministre du Patrimoine canadien, Mélanie Joly, qui était de passage mercredi au Centre communautaire Laurentien situé dans l’arrondissement montréalais d’Ahuntsic-Cartierville.

Mme Joly y annonçait l’octroi d’une subvention de 29 000 $ visant à améliorer la sécurité de ce centre communautaire musulman, qui abrite également une mosquée.

Ottawa épongera la moitié de la facture de ce projet frôlant les 60 000 $. Des pellicules de protection empêchant de fracasser les fenêtres seront apposées. Le centre se dotera également d’un système d’alarme, d’un système de télévision en circuit fermé et d’un système de contrôle des entrées.

Cet investissement du fédéral provient d’un programme mis en place il y a quelques années pour protéger les communautés à risque contre les crimes haineux.

Lors du dernier budget, Ottawa avait doublé le financement de ce programme, appelé Programme de financement des projets d’infrastructure de sécurité pour les collectivités à risque et chapeauté par le ministère de la Sécurité publique, pour le porter à 10 millions de dollars sur une période de cinq ans.

Interrogée en point de presse sur la présence plus visible de groupes d’extrême droite dans le paysage politique québécois, Mme Joly, qui est responsable des dossiers de l’inclusion et de la diversité au sein du gouvernement fédéral, a souligné qu’il est de notre responsabilité à tous de ne jamais baisser la garde.

«À chaque fois qu’il y a des discours haineux qui sont prononcés, on doit toujours les dénoncer», a-t-elle souligné.

«On a un rôle de leadership moral à jouer», a-t-elle rappelé à la classe politique.

Bien qu’aucun incident majeur ne soit à déplorer au Centre communautaire Laurentien, un sentiment d’insécurité avait fleuri chez ses membres dans la foulée de l’attentat perpétré à la mosquée de Québec le 29 janvier dernier.

Quelques semaines plus tard, Mme Joly participait à une rencontre avec des représentants de la communauté musulmane d’Ahuntsic-Cartierville pour discuter de ce qui pouvait être fait pour «accroître la tranquillité d’esprit» de ses membres.

C’est alors que le Centre communautaire Laurentien a décidé de déposer un projet auprès du gouvernement fédéral pour renforcer la sécurité des lieux.

Quelques incidents isolés étaient venus ternir la quiétude des lieux au cours des dernières années, dont notamment des messages haineux laissés sur la boîte vocale du centre et des vitres brisées, se rappelle le directeur du centre, Samer Elniz.

Il ajoute toutefois que pour ces quelques gestes odieux commis à l’encontre du centre, il répertorie un nombre incommensurablement supérieur de paroles chaleureuses et de mains tendues.

«C’est une minorité qui veut jouer avec le sentiment de la majorité», dénonce-t-il, se disant convaincu que le climat social continuera à s’améliorer au Québec.

Source: «On ne doit jamais tenir pour acquise notre cohésion sociale», dit Joly

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Worries about Malaysia’s ‘Arabisation’ grow as Saudi ties strengthen

2017/12/22 Leave a comment

Of note in Malaysia as elsewhere in Southeast Asia:

Malaysia’s growing ties to Saudi Arabia – and its puritan Salafi-Wahhabi Islamic doctrines –  are coming under new scrutiny as concerns grow over an erosion of traditional religious practices and culture in the multi-ethnic nation.

A string of recent events has fueled the concern. Hostility toward atheists, non-believers and the gay community has risen. Two annual beer festivals were canceled after Islamic leaders objected. A hardline preacher, accused of spreading hatred in India, has received official patronage.

The government has backed a parliamentary bill that would allow harsh sharia punishments, such as amputations for theft and stoning for adultery. And after religious officials supported a Muslim-only laundromat, Malaysia’s mostly ceremonial royalty made a rare public intervention, calling for religious harmony.

Marina Mahathir, the daughter of Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, publicly lashed out at the government for allowing the “Arabisation” of Malaysia.

Marina, who heads the civil rights group Sisters in Islam, told Reuters Saudi influence on Islam in Malaysia “has come at the expense of traditional Malay culture”. Her father, 93, now heads the opposition alliance.

Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Wahhabi beliefs have strongly influenced Malaysia – and neighboring Indonesia – for decades, but have strengthened considerably since Najib became prime minister in 2009 and began cozying up to the kingdom.

The relationship came under a harsh spotlight when nearly $700 million wound up in Najib’s bank account in 2013. Najib said it was a donation from the Saudi Royal family, rebutting allegations it was money siphoned from the 1MDB state investment fund he had founded and overseen. Malaysia’s attorney-general cleared him of any wrongdoing.

The trend toward a politicized brand of Islam in Malaysia, a middle-income emerging market, has alarmed Malaysia’s non-Muslims, including ethnic Chinese who comprise a quarter of the population and dominate private sector commerce. It is also a concern for foreign investors, who account for nearly half the local bond market and have invested $8.95 billion in project investments in the first nine months of this year.

The government denies actively promoting Wahhabi-style Islamic conservatism.

Najib has been largely silent about the recent religious controversies. Critics have accused the prime minister, whose governing coalition lost the popular vote in the last general election but retained a simple majority in parliament, of playing on fears that Islam and Malay political power will be eroded should the opposition win. An election is due by mid-2018.

ELECTION CALCULATIONS

Militancy has also been on the rise in Malaysia, which from 2013 to 2016 had arrested more than 250 people with alleged ties to Islamic State, many of whom were indoctrinated with hardline interpretations of Islam.

After the visit of the Saudi monarch this year, Malaysia announced plans to build the King Salman Centre for International Peace to bring together Islamic scholars and intelligence agencies in an effort to counter extremist interpretations of Islam.

The center, which is being built on a 16-hectare (40-acre) plot in the administrative capital of Putrajaya, will draw on the resources of the Saudi-financed Islamic Science University of Malaysia, and the Muslim World League, a Wahhabi Saudi religious body.

Saudi Arabia has long been funding mosques and schools in Malaysia, while providing scholarships for Malaysians to study in the kingdom. Many of them find employment in Malaysia’s multitude of Islamic agencies, said Farouk Musa, chairman and director of the moderate think-tank, Islamic Renaissance Front.

One of the most worrisome doctrines they preach in multi-cultural Malaysia is ‘al-w ala’ wa-al-bara’ or ”allegiance and disavowal“, Farouk said. ”This doctrine basically means do not befriend the non-believers (al-kuffar), even if they are among the closest relatives.

”We have never heard of Islamic scholars forbidding Muslims to wish Merry Christmas before, for example. Now, this is a common phenomenon,” he said.

The adoption of Arab culture and interpretations of Islam is a result of greater exposure to Middle Eastern people and universities, said Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, a member of the Supreme Council of Najib’s political party, the United Malay National Organisation.

“The extensive usage of social media also accelerated the external influence on the locals,” he told Reuters.

The government is not promoting Wahhabism but rather the doctrine of “wasatiyyah”, or moderation and balance, to accommodate Malaysia’s multi-cultural society, said Abdul Aziz, who is also a federal deputy minister.

CROWN PRINCE‘S REFORMS?

Karima Bennoune, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for cultural rights, expressed concern in a report after her September visit to Malaysia about the deepening involvement of religious authorities in policy decisions. She said this was influenced by “a hegemonic version of Islam imported from the Arabian Peninsula” that was “at odds with local forms of practice.”

She also expressed concern about “the banning of books, including some about moderate and progressive Islam, in the country when the government extols these very concepts abroad”.

Marina Mahathir said religious departments, staffed with Saudi graduates, “are now consulted on absolutely everything, from movies to health and medicine to insurance, all sorts of things that they do not necessarily have any expertise in”.

The kingdom also exerts leverage over Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia through the quotas it gives to countries for the number of pilgrims they can send on the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam that all capable Muslims must perform at least once in their lives.

This could all start to change if Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman succeeds in returning the Saudi kingdom to “a moderate Islam,” which he says was practiced before 1979.

He has already scaled back the role of religious police, permitted public concerts and announced women will be allowed to drive.

The kingdom has also set up an authority to scrutinize uses of the “hadith” – accounts of the sayings, actions or habits of the Prophet – to prevent them being used to justify violence or terrorism.

Source: Worries about Malaysia’s ‘Arabisation’ grow as Saudi ties strengthen

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Stress From Racism May Be Causing African-American Babies To Die More Often : Shots – Health News : NPR

2017/12/21 Leave a comment

Ongoing impact from micro-agressions or other factors?

“Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for every 1,000 live births, 4.8 white infants die in the first year of life. For black babies, that number is 11.7.

The majority of those black infants that die are born premature, says James, because black mothers like Pierce have a higher risk of going into early labor.

Scientists and doctors have spent decades trying to understand what makes African-American women so vulnerable to losing their babies. Now, there is growing consensus that racial discrimination experienced by black mothers during their lifetime makes them less likely to carry their babies to full term.

James, 65, has seen far too many black babies who didn’t survive.

It just doesn’t seem right, says James, who is also African-American. “You ask yourself the question: What is it about being black that places us at an increased risk for that kind of experience?”

A decades-long quest

Richard David, a neonatologist at the University of Illinois of Chicago, has been studying this for decades. When he first began looking into the problem in the 1980s, he says scientists thought the two main culprits were poverty and lack of education.

“We knew African-American women were more likely to be poor,” says David. “We knew that fewer of them had completed their education by the time they were bearing children.”

But David, who at the time was at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and his colleague James Collins at Northwestern University Medical School found that even educated, middle-class African-American women were at a higher risk of having smaller, premature babies with a lower chance of survival.

For example, David says, black and white teenage mothers growing up in poor neighborhoods both have a higher risk of having smaller, premature babies. “They both have something like a 13 percent chance of having a low birth weight baby,” he says.

But in higher-income neighborhoods where women are likely to be slightly older and more educated, “among white women, the risk of low birth weight drops dramatically to about half of that, whereas for African-American women, it only drops a little bit.”

In fact, today, a college-educated black woman like Samantha Pierce is more likely to give birth prematurely than a white woman with a high school degree.

“That’s exactly the kind of case that makes us ask the question: What else is there?” says David. “What are we missing?”

Some people suggested that the root cause may be genetics. But if genes are at play, then women from Africa would also have the same risks. So, David and his colleague, Collins, looked at the babies of immigrant women from West Africa. But as they reported in their 1997 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, those babies were more like white babies — they were bigger and more likely to be full term. So, it clearly isn’t genetics, says David.

Then, many years later, David and Collins noticed something startling. The grandchildren of African immigrant women were born smaller than their mothers had been at birth. In other words, the grandchildren were more likely than African-American babies — more likely to be premature.

This was also true of the grandchildren of black women who had emigrated from the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, the grandchildren of white European immigrant women were bigger than their mothers when they were born. David and Collins published their results in 2002 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“So, there was something about growing up black in the United States and then bearing a child that was associated with lower birth weight,” says David.

Growing up black and female in America

What is different about growing up black in America is discrimination, says David. “It’s hard to find any aspect of life that’s not impacted by racial discrimination,” he says. “Whether you’re talking about applying for a job, or purchasing a new car, finding housing, getting education … even given equal education, earning the same amount of money, that doesn’t happen. If you’re black, you tend to get less pay.”

As a recent poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found, 92 percent of African-Americans believe that discrimination against African-Americans exists in America today. Higher education and income did not necessarily mean people experienced less discrimination, the poll found.

In 2004, David and Collins published a study in the American Journal of Public Health in which they reported the connection between a mother’s experience of racism and preterm birth. They asked women about their housing, income, health habits and discrimination. “It turned out that as a predictor of a very low birth weight outcome, these racial discrimination questions were more powerful than asking a woman whether or not she smoked cigarettes,” David says.

Other studies have shown the same results.

via Stress From Racism May Be Causing African-American Babies To Die More Often : Shots – Health News : NPR

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i24NEWS – Austria pledges to grant citizenship to Holocaust victim descendants

2017/12/21 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see whether there is much take up by descendants:

The newly minted Austrian government will grant citizenship to the descendants of Holocaust victims, Haaretz reported Tuesday.The decision comes in the wake of a diplomatic spat between Israel and Vienna as Austria’s new coalition between the conservatives and the far-right Freedom Party was sworn in on Monday, rekindling an alliance from the early 2000s which prompted unease around Europe.

The Freedom Party, led by Heinz-Christian Strache, has a past stained by frequent anti-Semitic incidents and instances of Nazi propaganda, which is why a harsh Israeli response was widely expected

According to a statement released by the Israeli government, “Israel will continue to work with civil servants of the Ministries headed by members of the Freedom Party”, but will also “continue to struggle against Anti-semitism” and “for the commemoration of the Holocaust.”

Some Israeli media have interpreted the statement as a “boycott” of the Freedom Party Ministers at the political level, since it says that “working relations” will continue with “civil servants”.

Others have emphasized that working relations will go on, reading the statement as a weak reaction. The reaction is certainly milder than in 2000, when the Freedom Party first joined a coalition government and Israeli authorities withdrew the Ambassador from Vienna.

Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache has traveled to Israel a number of times, and developed ties with representatives of the Israeli right. In one of his last trips, however, late Israeli President Shimon Peres had refused to meet him.

via i24NEWS – Austria pledges to grant citizenship to Holocaust victim descendants

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ICYMI: Racist reporting still rife in Australian media

2017/12/21 Leave a comment

Haven’t seen the equivalent study of Canadian media but may have missed it (readers to advise):

Half of all race-related opinion pieces in the Australian mainstream media are likely to contravene industry codes of conduct on racism.

In research released this week, the Who Watches the Media report found that of 124 race-related opinion pieces published between January and July this year, 62 were potentially in breach of one or more industry codes of conduct, because of racist content.

Despite multiple industry codes of conduct stipulating fair race-related reporting, racist reporting is a weekly phenomenon in Australia’s mainstream media.

We define racism as unjust covert or overt behaviour towards a person or a group on the basis of their racial background. This might be perpetrated by a person, a group, an organisation, or a system.

The research, conducted by not-for-profit group All Together Now and the University of Technology Sydney, focused on opinion-based pieces in the eight Australian newspapers and current affairs programs with the largest audiences, as determined by ratings agencies.

We found that negative race-related reports were most commonly published in News Corp publications. The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and Herald Sun were responsible for the most negative pieces in the press. A Current Affair was the most negative among the broadcast media.

Chart 1: Number of race-related stories by outlet and type of reporting

Muslims were mentioned in more than half of the opinion pieces, and more than twice as many times as any other single group mentioned (see chart 2).

Muslims were portrayed more negatively than the other minority groups (see chart 3), with 63% of reports about Muslims framed negatively. These pieces often conflated Muslims with terrorism. For example, reports used terrorist attacks in the UK to question accepting Muslim refugees and immigrants to Australia.

This was a recurring theme in race-based opinion pieces over the study period. In contrast, there were more positive than negative stories about Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.

Negative commentary about minority groups has lasting impacts in the community. An op-ed in the New York Times recently highlighted the impact that racism in the media has on individuals. It explained:

…racism doesn’t have to be experienced in person to affect our health — taking it in the form of news coverage is likely to have similar effects.
The noted effects include elevated blood pressure, long after television scenes are over. Racism is literally making us sick.

Note also that given the lack of cultural diversity among opinion-makers, particularly on television, social commentators are largely talking about groups to which they do not belong. According to the 2016-20 PwC Media Outlook report, the average media employee is 27, Caucasian and male, which does not reflect the current population diversity of Australia.

This creates a strong argument for increasing the cultural diversity of all media agencies to help minimise the number of individuals or groups being negatively depicted in race-related reports.

via Racist reporting still rife in Australian media

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Diversity must be the driver of artificial intelligence: Kriti Sharma

2017/12/20 Leave a comment

Agree. Those creating the algorithms and related technology need to be both more diverse and more mindful of the assumptions baked into their analysis and work:

The question over what to do about biases and inequalities in the technology industry is not a new one. The number of women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields has always been disproportionately less than men. What may be more perplexing is, why is it getting worse?

It’s 2017, and yet according to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in a review of more than 380 studies from academic journals, corporations, and government sources, there is a major employment gap for women in computing and engineering.

North America, as home to leading centres of innovation and technology, is one of the worst offenders. A report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) found “the high-tech industry employed far fewer African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, relative to Caucasians, Asian-Americans, and men.”

However, as an executive working on the front line of technology, focusing specifically on artificial intelligence (AI), I’m one of many hoping to turn the tables.

This issue isn’t only confined to new product innovation. It’s also apparent in other aspects of the technology ecosystem – including venture capital. As The Globe highlighted, Ontario-based MaRS Data Catalyst published research on women’s participation in venture capital and found that “only 12.5 per cent of investment roles at VC firms were held by women. It could find just eight women who were partners in those firms, compared with 93 male partners.”

The Canadian government, for its part, is trying to address this issue head on and at all levels. Two years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on, and then fulfilled, the promise of having a cabinet with an equal ratio of women to men – a first in Canada’s history. When asked about the outcome from this decision at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, he said, “It has led to a better level of decision-making than we could ever have imagined.”

Despite this push, disparities in developed countries like Canada are still apparent where “women earn 11 per cent less than men in comparable positions within a year of completing a PhD in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics, according to an analysis of 1,200 U.S. grads.”

AI is the creation of intelligent machines that think and learn like humans. Every time Google predicts your search, when you use Alexa or Siri, or your iPhone predicts your next word in a text message – that’s AI in action.

Many in the industry, myself included, strongly believe that AI should reflect the diversity of its users, and are working to minimize biases found in AI solutions. This should drive more impartial human interactions with technology (and with each other) to combat things like bias in the workplace.

The democratization of technology we are experiencing with AI is great. It’s helping to reduce time-to-market, it’s deepening the talent pool, and it’s helping businesses of all size cost-effectively gain access to the most modern of technology. The challenge is there are a few large organizations currently developing the AI fundamentals that all businesses can use. Considering this, we must take a step back and ensure the work happening is ethical.

AI is like a great big mirror. It reflects what it sees. And currently, the groups designing AI are not as diverse as we need them to be. While AI has the potential to bring services to everyone that are currently only available to some, we need to make sure we’re moving ahead in a way that reflects our purpose – to achieve diversity and equality. AI can be greatly influenced by human-designed choices, so we must be aware of the humans behind the technology curating it.

At a point when AI is poised to revolutionize our lives, the tech community has a responsibility to develop AI that is accountable and fit for purpose. For this reason, Sage created Five Core Principles to developing AI for business.

At the end of the day, AI’s biggest problem is a social one – not a technology one. But through diversity in its creation, AI will enable better-informed conversations between businesses and their customers.

If we can train humans to treat software better, hopefully, this will drive humans to treat humans better.

via Diversity must be the driver of artificial intelligence – The Globe and Mail

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Trump may have emboldened hate in Canada, but it was already here: Ryan Scrivens

2017/12/20 Leave a comment

Good overview by Scrivens:

A key turning point, in fact, was during the latter months of 2015. Two important events created a perfect storm for the movement.

First was Justin Trudeau’s pledge, as part of the Liberal party’s election platform, to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of 2015. The second was the terrorist attack on concert-goers in Paris, inspired by the so-called “Islamic State,” on Nov. 13, 2015.

Each of these events were distinct in nature, yet Canada’s radical right wing treated them as interconnected, arguing that Canada’s newly elected prime minister was not only allowing Muslims into the country who would impose Sharia law on Canadian citizens, but that they too could be “radical Islamic terrorists.”

It all sparked a flurry of anti-Muslim discourse in Canada.

The day after the Paris attack, a mosque in Peterborough, Ont., was deliberately set ablaze, causing significant damage to the interior of the building.

The next day, a Muslim woman picking up her children from a Toronto school was robbed and her hijab torn off. The perpetrators called her a “terrorist” and told her to “go back to your country.”

Days later, an anti-Muslim video was posted on YouTube in which a man from Montreal, wearing a Joker mask and wielding a firearm, threatened to kill one Muslim or Arab each week.

Similar events continued to unfold in 2016 — all, of course, well before Trump’s election victory. A school in Calgary, for example, was spray-painted with hate messages against Syrians and Trudeau: “Syrians go home and die” and “Kill the traitor Trudeau.”

Edmonton residents were also faced with a series of anti-Islamic flyer campaigns, hateful messages were spray-painted on a Muslim elementary school in Ottawa and man in Abbotsford, B.C. went on a racist tirade and was caught on video.

Canadian chapters of Soldiers of Odin first made their presence known in the early part of 2016 by patrolling communities and “protecting” Canadians from the threat of Islam, and the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), an anti-Islam group who first appeared in Canada in 2015, continued to rally in Montreal and Toronto in 2016.

And so it would be impulsive and short-sighted for us to attribute our spike in hatred solely to Trump and his divisive politics.

Instead, the instances listed above serve as an important reminder that prior to Trump’s election victory Canada was experiencing a rise in hatred.

In responding to hatred in Canada, we must first acknowledge that it exists in Canada, and it becomes ever more present during times of social and economic uncertainty. We must also acknowledge that the foundations of hatred are complex and multi-faceted, grounded in both individual and social conditions.

So too, then, must counter-extremist initiatives be multi-dimensional, building on the strengths and expertise of diverse sectors, including but not limited to community organizations, police officers, policy-makers and the media. Multi-agency efforts are needed to coordinate the acknowledgement and response to right-wing extremism in Canada.

I see signs of us moving in the right direction in building resilience against hatred in Canada. But in the months and years ahead, there’s still much to do.

via Trump may have emboldened hate in Canada, but it was already here

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German anti-Semitism commissioner idea backed by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere | DW

2017/12/19 Leave a comment

Ongoing concern:

Germany’s interior minister has joined the chorus of politicians expressing concern over the burning of Israeli flags in Berlin. Germany’s Central Council of Jews has been calling for an anti-Semitism commissioner.

Acting Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in an interview with German national newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he supports creating the position of anti-Semitism commissioner in the next German government.

The conservative De Maiziere said his support for the commissioner went beyond the most recent incidents — in which Berlin protesters burned Israeli flags to demonstrate against US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — and was also based on the recommendation of an independent commission of experts.

Germany’s Central Council of Jews has also called repeatedly for an anti-Semitism commissioner to be part of the chancellor’s office.

In the interview, de Maiziere expressed his concern over the increase in anti-Semitic agitation in Germany.

“Each crime motivated by anti-Semitism is one to many and shameful for our country,” he told the paper. He also said that occurrences of derogatory comments, inappropriate jokes and discrimination towards “our fellow Jewish citizens” were on the rise.

“Hatred towards Jews must never be allowed to take hold again in Germany,” he added, alluding to Germany’s historic responsibility for the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed.

His words on the subject of anti-Semitism were the latest to emerge from a German politician in the aftermath of protests in front of the US Embassy in central Berlin and in the immigrant-heavy Neukölln neighborhood.

The minister spoke out in favor of cracking down on protesters’ actions that demonstrate a hatred of Israel, including through police action when possible.

“We cannot tolerate it when a country’s flag is burned in public,” he said. “It is the symbolic annihilation of a country’s right to exist.”

Current German law makes it illegal to burn flags and symbols of a foreign state that have been officially installed. Burning homemade or non-official flags is not a crime, though incitement to violence against Jews is.

De Maiziere said that he found the burning of homemade flags comparable to burning official ones. “I consider the burning of imitation flags to also be a disruption of public security and order.”

De Maiziere’s fellow Christian Democratic (CDU) politician and acting Chancellor Angela Merkel also has denounced the burning of Israeli symbols.

via German anti-Semitism commissioner idea backed by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere | News | DW | 17.12.2017

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